Ok so last night:

���� I was a police officer; four or five of us were investigating a murder. Some kind of tip-off led us to a back room (pipes, ducts, fences, etc.; these things are in my dreams ALL the time) in some building, somewhere. We cut open one of the big ducts and found about forty ziploc bags containing meat. The bags were shiny, unscuffed, unsmudged. The meat was, by meat standards, beautiful: loose snowballs of rosy ground meat; tiny, blood-red, porkchop-shaped cuts; compact, bright steaks and variously-hued organs, all clean and smooth and lustrous.

���� Somehow, the mood became jubilant. We'd hit something big; the investigation was moving along; soon we'd have the bad guy. Right now though, it was time to eat some steaks.

���� At the station there was an area in the back with a hallway and a kitchen and a staircase and whatever the area staircases stand in is called, all exactly home-like. They set up the table beside the stairs, beneath the giant portrait of some police ancestor. I stood against the wall, as far away from the scene as the shape of the room allowed. Candles were lit and people started to sit as the food was brought out.

���� To my surprise, one of the cops led a small boy to the table: my brother Matthew, six years old. He looked at his plate and started to cry. I ran over and snatched him away, took him to a room upstairs and tried to calm him. Three of the group caught up with us and held me against a wall while they spanked him. They went back downstairs. I looked out the window; there was a van beneath it in the parking lot below. We could leave this way but, not knowing where young Matthew was from and why he was six years old, I was hesitant to remove him from the building. I thought about it for a while and told him we could go to the movies; he said he didn't like movies.


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